Lian Li PC-S80 PC case

Review date: 13 July 2006Last modified
03-Dec-2011.

You know what?

If you want a silent computer, just forget
it. It's not worth the trouble.

Oh, sure, it can be done. There are several
ways. Cool-running fanless CPUs,
solid statedrives. But if you want
a really and truly silent PC with ordinary
drives in it, you're going to need to vibration-isolate
the moving parts with things like
these, and then be
pretty careful with your heat management.

And, yes, you could also get yourself one
of the models of
Mac with no fan. Old PowerPC iMacs, G4
Cubes, that kind of thing. The more boring
models are cheap as chips on eBay these days,
though hardly front runners in the performance
department.

Really, though, you've got to resign yourself
to at least a bit of noise even with
those, because they've got normal drives in
them. If you want to use off-the-shelf PC components
and keep them cool, some noise is unavoidable.
But you can minimise it if you get a case with
some noise-absorbing, fan-baffling features.

Like this one, for instance. It's Lian Li's
PC-S80, and it combines several interesting
computer-silencing ideas with some of the innovations
of their striking PC-V1000.

As with most of their cases, Lian Li make
the S80 in in black and silver versions, and
Aus PC Market here in Australia stock both of
them. The black one sells for $AU478.50, including
delivery in the Sydney metropolitan area (delivery
elsewhere in the country costs a bit more, but
even if you're in
Perth you'll only pay $AU30 more, which
isn't bad for a place that's a 3,950 kilometre
drive from the AusPC warehouse). The silver
S80, however, is for some reason $AU511.50,
so you'd have to be pretty darn enthusiastic
about the brushed aluminium look to buy it.

Since both S80s have a lockable front door
that covers all of the externally visible drives,
you don't have to buy special black drives in
order to avoid Piebald PC Syndrome if you get
the cheaper black S80. Beige drives in a silver
case look just as bad anyway, if you ask me.

(In the USA at the moment, the situation
seems to be
reversed, with the black version costing
more than the silver one. That's the normal
order of things. Australia's odd pricing probably
has something to do with
hemispheres.)

Even the black version's price is, of course,
quite a lot for a computer case which, like
other Lian Lis, doesn't even come with a power
supply.

But you do, literally, get a lot of case
for your money.

The S80 is an unremarkable 210mm (8.3 inches)
wide, and a not-that-huge 590mm (23.2 inches)
deep and tall. It's got four 5.25 inch bays
hidden behind its front door, and five internal
3.5 inch bays. So if you want a floppy drive,
you'll either have to use an external one or
mount it in adapter rails in a 5.25 bay.

So the S80's not huge, but it weighs 13.2
kilograms, versus about eight kilos for the
PC-V1000. The older "PC-60style" Lian Lis are
around six kilos.

The S80's made almost entirely out of aluminium,
of course; it wouldn't be a Lian Li if it weren't.
So the extra weight doesn't come from heavy
metal. It comes from more metal, as you
soon discover when you start taking the thing
apart.

The back of the S80's dominated by a big
air-duct thingy, which you don't have to remove
to open the case. If you want to remove it,
though, it's easy to do; the duct is held in
place with the same sort of hook-tab arrangement
that retains the sides of most PC cases.

The function of the duct's not immediately
obvious from the outside, though you can
see the neat little clip-in grommet that gives
you somewhere to park your power cable.

Flip the thing over, though, and you can
see that (a) it's lined with noise-reducing
foam, and (b) it's got two compartments.

The idea is that one compartment matches
an intake fan (a nice big 120mm one), and the
other matches the outflow from the PSU. Without
this doodad, warm air that's just left the S80
will get sucked back in again, unless you turn
some fans around inside the case.

Few PC cases get this clever with their air
flow. They generally just have a front-to-back
air path, with any and all rear fans blowing
outward and any and all front ones sucking inward.
That works OK, but air entering the front of
the case, and the fans sucking it in, make noise.
As we'll see, the S80 has no front intakes at
all.

The S80's side panels are big solid pieces
of aluminium, just like the side panels of the
V1000. As with the V1000, though, it's very
easy to remove them. You just undo a single
captive thumbscrew on the appropriate top back
corner...

...and slide out the catch that the screw
retains, and then the whole panel hinges down
into your hands. You don't have to do any of
the panel-sliding malarkey that normal PC cases
require. This is good, because while slide-lock
panels are usually easy to remove, they can
be a pain to replace.

When I first took the side panel off the
S80, though, I was flummoxed by the following
view.

This looks for all the world like what you
see if you remove the wrong side panel from
a case. Do that and you end up looking at the
back of the motherboard tray, which is not something
that most people ever need to do. You usually
only take off that side panel to get access
to the far side of the drive bays; there's seldom
any reason to touch the back of the motherboard
area.

This, though, is not the motherboard tray
- though I admit to peeking under the panel
on the other side of the case to verify
that there wasn't some kind of spatio-temporal
inversion going on. This weirdness is actually
part of the S80's air flow design.

See, air gets into the S80 through the vertical
grilles toward the back of the side panels.
It flows forward through the gap between the
inside of the side panel and the outside of
these secondary panels underneath, then into
the true body of the case through vertical vents
at the front.

To see what happens to it then - or to actually
get at any components - you have to either remove
the secondary panels, or port over the neat-o
little Flash animation on the S80
product page (see it as big as your browser
window
here!).

It's easy enough to remove the secondary
panels, since they're retained by another bunch
of Lian Li's signature thumbscrews. There's
more vibration-damping rubber on the inside
of one of them, but it hasn't been added as
an afterthought; it neither sticks to anything
nor jams the panel in place.

Underneath, you find something that resembles
the inside of a normal PC case.

Closest to the camera in this photo is the
motherboard mounting area, which is shaded by
an awning-shaped air director that's fed by
the 120mm rear intake fan. The awning is, of
course, removable (more thumbscrews) so you
can actually get a motherboard into the case
(any normal ATX or smaller board will fit).
You can still get at the expansion card area
with the awning in place, though; the cards
are as usual retained with yet more thumbscrews.

Once your PC's built, the idea is that the
awning lines up more or less with the CPU socket.
You push the awning down on its hinge until
it sits close to the CPU fan and maximises air
flow onto it.

As an exhaust, the awning wouldn't work very
well. As an intake, it's a good idea. Choose
a cool-ish CPU and you could actually run it
with a large heat sink and no fan of its own
at all.

Of course, if the awning doesn't line
up with the CPU socket(s) on your mobo, you
might as well just remove it altogether. The
rear fan will still direct air onto the motherboard
in general.

Between the mobo area and the front of the
case, there are the 3.5 inch drive bays (five
of 'em) and the fans that drive the S80's twisty-turny
air flow.

The bays (which Lian Li
call a "crowding shape bracket") are cousins
to the 3.5 inch bays in the V1000, in that they
let you slide drives in without using tools
and then clip them in place with sliding plastic
latches. The V1000 achieved this feat with special
screws
for the sides of the drives; the S80 does it
with whole removable trays into which you screw
your drives.

The trays are aluminium, of course, and should
provide considerable heat sinking for drives
mounted in them.

Consumer hard drives can stand running surprisingly
hot, but it's still not a great idea to test
their strength.

In ordinary computer cases, drives get hot
because there's very little cooling air flowing
over them and/or because they're cheek-by-jowl
with another drive. Or, worse yet, sandwiched
between two other drives.

Hard drives produce significant heat whenever
they're spinning, because of friction between
the air inside the drive and the platter(s)
(compare and contrast:
Tesla turbine), so if you want to stop the
meat in a hard drive sandwich from getting very
hot you either have to make sure that one or
more of the drives is likely to be in spun-down
sleep mode at any given time, or have to blow
a noisy hurricane of cooling air over the whole
arrangement.

The S80 drive bays, like the V1000 ones,
make it impossible for you to mount your
drives with only tiny gaps between them. And,
in typical Lian Li fashion, the cooling fans
are right in front of the bays and blowing around
the ends of the drives as well as through the
bay cage.

The down side of this spaced-bays setup is
that you can't fit as many drives in the same
space, but five still ought to be enough for
most people. It's not a hard limit, anyway;
you can use cheap adapter rails to install 3.5
inch drives in spare 5.25 inch bays if you like.

The S80's front fans are 120mm units, identical
to the rear fan but mounted in removable frames.
They've got ball bearings and they only spin
at 1500RPM, which means they ought to last close
to forever without maintenance.

Each of these fans is, according to the sticker,
rated at 0.27 amps. Multiply that by 12 volts
and you get 3.24 watts. Their actual running
power is probably a bit lower; they'll draw
a bit more (but not burn up) if they're jammed
and unable to spin.

Three watts is a high-medium kind of fan
power, and it and their diameter means these
fans move more air than most. Lian Li
rates
them at 56.3 cubic feet per minute (CFM).

To get that kind of flow figure out of a
mere eighty millimetre fan, you need
to drive it at something like 4000RPM with about
a four watt motor. That gives you a much louder
fan - in the 45dBA-at-one-metre
range, compared with the mere 24.7dBA rating
of the Lian Li fans.

The mystical
behaviour of the human ear means that this
roughly 20dB difference causes the 4000RPM 80mm
fan to sound about four times as loud as the
1500RPM 120mm one.

The actual amount of air the fans manage
to move through the S80 per minute will be a
lot lower than their rating might lead you to
expect. CFM numbers for fans are always free-air
ratings - they're what the fan manages when
it's just hanging in space, not pushing air
through a case. These fans are trying to move
air through a Z-shaped path before it even gets
to them, and then push it out through the power
supply mounting area. Normal PSUs have at least
one fan of their own (and there's yet another
fan, which we'll get to in a moment), but there's
still a quite large amount of resistance in
this air path. Air does not like turning corners,
especially sharp ones - and narrow, wide ducts
like the ones in the S80's walls are real
turbulence adventures.

On the other hand, the two fans at the front
of the S80 really only have to cool the drives
and stir a bit more air through the case to
stop the 5.25 inch drives from dying of heat
stroke. And the circuitous air path does
mean there are no inlets or outlets at the front
of the S80, and plenty of stuff between the
user and the front fans. And those front fans
are mounted on rubber bushings that stop
some of their vibration from being transmitted
to their frames; the frames, in turn, each have
a strip of rubber on their screw-on flanges.

Here's the power supply corner of the S80.

The PSU mounts in the same way it does in
various other Lian Lis. There's a plate on the
back of the case that you remove and screw onto
the PSU, then you post the resulting assembly
back into the case through the plate's mounting
hole, and re-fasten the plate's thumbscrews.
If your PSU has a protruding grille on its top
or bottom then you may have to mount it the
traditional way, by threading it through the
case from the inside, but you'll still be able
to turn the plate either way up so you can install
your PSU with its grille facing up or down.

The space above where the PSU installs,
however, remains empty in the S80. And, lurking
in the shadows in the above picture, you can
see an 80mm fan facing into said space. The
idea is that the PSU doesn't have to contribute
anything much to the overall air flow; exhaust
air mainly bypasses it, and is escorted out
of the case by the 80mm fan, which is far enough
inside the case that not much of its own noise
gets out.

And, of course, what noise does escape
runs into the exterior split-duct thingy, and
is further attenuated.

What this all means is that you can install
a quiet PSU with a thermally controlled fan
in the S80 without worrying about that PSU messing
up the air flow for the whole case. You could
even install a fanless PSU, or a hybrid
like Antec's Phantom
500 which only turns its fan on when it
has to. The Phantom 500 is unusually long and
so won't fit in some cases, but there's plenty
of room in the S80.

On the other hand, the rear exhaust grille
fed by the 80mm fan isn't all that huge, as
you can see when the rear duct's removed.

So that's another minus in the S80 Air Flow
Equation; the PSU and that rear vent, after
all, have to exhaust all of the air the
S80 inhales.

O, the complexity.

The door on the vent-less front of the case
has a rubber gasket around its edge, to quieten
things down even more.

The top 5.25 inch bay has a "stealth" panel
that lets you install a white drive behind it
without spoiling the look of the case - but
I don't know whether I'd bother, seeing as there's
that darn great door and all.

The other aluminium 5.25 inch bay covers
are just clipped in place, as is normal for
Lian Li cases, so they're very easy to remove
when you want to install drives. As is also
normal for Lian Li, though, the covers are secure
enough that they won't buzz or rattle. If your
Lian Li case is making such a noise, it's probably
because you forgot to tighten some thumbscrews
when you reassembled it.

There's one odd thing on the front panel,
though - the power and reset buttons.

Or lack thereof.

All you get for these two functions is the
above-pictured nude switches, with no actual
buttons attached to them. This is no
big deal, since the door conceals the switches
most of the time and it's not actually at all
difficult to press them. But when I first saw
them, I thought that someone at the factory
must have forgotten to press the buttons in
place, or that they'd fallen off in transit.

Nope; there never were any. Don't bother
looking. Apparently some S80s
had buttons, but the current ones don't.

The switches have LEDs in the middle of them
- power LED in the power switch, drive LED in
the reset switch. That doesn't matter much either,
since you can't see them when the S80's door
is closed.

The S80 has ports on its front, as is normal
for cases these days - you get an unremarkable
single FireWire, two USB and two audio connectors,
all of which can be hooked up to most motherboards
with the usual spray of fiddly little connectors.

Unusually, though, the ports aren't on the
front of the case, exactly.

They're on the front of the top panel,
facing upwards.

Many cables and short-cabled devices will,
therefore, therefore look a bit weird when plugged
into them. The ports may also collect dust,
I suppose, though not necessarily any more than
many other front ports do - often, the computer's
fans suck air in through them.

So how quiet is it?

Good question. I have no answer for you.

Oh, I can tell you how much fan noise escapes
the PC-S80: Very little. And I can guarantee
you that noisy internal components - whining
video card or CPU cooler fans, and to some extent
even spin-cycle optical drives - will sound
quieter in the S80 than in almost any other
case. That includes the older
PC-6070, which was
basically just a PC-60 with a door, but probably
doesn't include
this very expensive thing.

How much noise your computer will actually
make if you build it in an S80, though, I don't
know. That depends on what you put in it, and
also on what you do with it, since lots of modern
PC gear has thermally controlled fans. CPU coolers,
PSUs, motherboard chipset coolers and graphics
cards can, thus, all be very quiet when the
computer's idling and a lot louder when you're
working it hard.

There are too many variables to say anything
definite, though. The S80's circuitous air path
means that it doesn't actually get a whole lot
of throughflow ventilation compared with many
ordinary cases. That doesn't mean it'll overheat
- I'd be confident putting arbitrarily speedy
hardware in this enclosure, though it's not
the best choice for overclockers - but it does
mean that it's definitely going to run warmer
than a high-airflow case, especially a wide
open cheese-grater like the V1000. More heat
means faster fan speeds and more noise; you
can't change just one variable.

If you really want to move a lot of air through
a twisty turny path, you can do it with a
great big fan, but
what you really need is a device with a different
ratio of free-air flow to static pressure. Static
pressure is the amount of pressure increase
a given air-mover can create when it's blowing
into a sealed box, and it's not the strong suit
of plain rotary fans.

You don't see a lot of centrifugal blowers
hooked up to PC cases, but it certainly can
be done (and
overdone!).
To get a lot of static pressure and reasonable
efficiency, though, you need a rotor/stator
setup, probably with at least two "stages" -
sets of rotating and static vanes.

That sounds very complex and jet-engine-y,
but it's actually the way that many ordinary
vacuum cleaner suction motors
work, as all
civilised people of course already know.
An old vacuum blower running at rather lower
power and hooked up to the exhaust vent would
probably shift air through an S80 very nicely
indeed. The main reason why nobody sells such
an arrangement commercially is, I think, just
that it takes up a lot more space than a normal
fan, especially if you add a noise muffler to
the output.

Getting back to the real world, where you
put your computer also affects its noise
level. You'll obviously hear less noise from
a PC if it's further away from you, all other
things being equal, but there are other tricks
you can use to quieten things down. Hang sound
absorbent material on the wall behind the PC,
for instance. Something as simple as an old
blanket, duct taped to the wall, will do. You
can use similar treatments on other surfaces
around the computer that reflect sound toward
you. You can even stick or hang absorbent material
on the computer's panels to make them
less resonant, as long as you don't
cover any vents. PCs get very nearly all of
their cooling from the air flow through them,
so it's fine to cover all of the panels with blanketty stuff if you like;
the computer won't run measurably hotter.

(And yes, this means that case
manufacturers who say their cases run cooler
because they're made from aluminium are not
telling the truth. Aluminium has much better
thermal conductivity than steel, so it's
possible that aluminium cases can cool hard
drives and any other components that get
little airflow and are screwed directly to
the case just a hair better, but if
you built the exact same chassis out of
steel, the cooling difference would be
trivial. Fancy aluminium cases usually have
more fans and more inlet and output vents
than do cheap steel cases; that's what makes
the difference.)

You can
also gin up your own S80-style rear air redirector
out of cardboard. Part of the reason why the
S80's redirector quietens the case down is that
both of its vents face downward, so they reflect
noise into the carpet.

Don't let all this put you off, though. If
you're looking for a case that really will make
a given bunch of hardware noticeably quieter,
the S80 is that case.

Overall

The S80 gets high marks in almost all of
the usual Lian Li departments. It's nicely made,
it looks good, it's easy to work on (those V1000-type
side panels are really nice), and it's
not terribly expensive for what you get. If
you're pinching pennies then you can save the
price of a perfectly good video card by buying
a basic case instead of a fancy one like this,
but the S80's target market is people who are
willing to pay for quietness as well as style.
And the thing still only costs about as much
as the old Lian Li full towers;
they've made some much more expensive
cases.

Unlike normal Lian Lis, the S80 isn't a particularly
light case, but that's not very important.
It's not easy to tell the difference between
a supposedly lightweight case and a normal steel
one, once you've built a computer into them
both.

There's also no slide-out motherboard tray,
but this case isn't cramped enough that you
really need one. Sliding a mobo right
out requires various cables to be unplugged,
so what most people use slide-out trays for,
if they use them at all, is sliding the mobo
out a couple of inches so they can get at the
RAM slots. That shouldn't be much of a problem
with the S80.

If you're fiddling with your computer all
the time then the S80's extra internal panels
may be a pain, but there's nothing stopping
you just leaving the inner and outer
panels off and running your computer half-nude
while you're diagnosing that RAM problem or
swapping drives around or whatever.

This thing isn't a perfect
Cone of Silence for your PC, and if you're
a player of 3D games or eager to build some
other high-powered maybe-overclocked box, you're
likely to find the increased fan speeds from
the gear inside the enclosure largely cancel
out its sound insulation. And, furthermore,
who cares if the S80's own fans last forever,
if your video card fan wears out after eight
months?

If you're willing to work with the
S80 instead of against it, though, you can get
a lot of CPU and video card power for not
that much heat these days. Especially if
you use some mildly odd components. Build a
PC based on some flavour of
Core processor - they're not that
expensive these days - and add a video card
with
no
fan at all, and your computer will be very
quiet even if you put it in an ordinary
case.

The S80's ideally suited to a system like
that, but it'll also do a good job of quieting
down normal midrange PCs, definitely including
most game machines. An S80 won't get along as
well with really high heat components, so those
of you who're in love with 70% overclocks and
10,000RPM hard drives should look elsewhere.

For everyone else, though, the S80 gets a
"recommended" from me.

Buy one!Australian shoppers can purchase the PC-S80 from Aus PC Market.
For the black version,
click here;
for the silver version,
click here.

(If you're not in Australia or New Zealand,
Aus PC Market won't deliver to you. If you're in the USA, try a price search
at
DealTime!)